Keeping Ashley Smith alive deemed praise-worthy at Nova Institution

When Alfred Legere, then the warden of the Nova Institution for Women in Truro, N.S., got the call telling him that Ashley Smith had died at another federal prison, he broke the news to his staff and then called an inmate assembly.

The teenager had been at Nova twice the previous year.

Mr. Legere figured some of the inmates would have known her or heard of her; he didn’t want them learning of Ashley’s death through the media. He also “wanted them to know we were aware and that we cared about their feelings.”

All he did was read aloud the official Correctional Service of Canada press release.

One of the inmates spoke up.

She had been in segregation for some of the time Ashley was there. “This wouldn’t have happened at Nova,” the inmate said. “The staff here did a great job keeping her alive.”

She then led the others in a standing ovation for the Nova staff.

Such was the challenge that Ashley posed to her handlers that just keeping her alive — the most fundamental duty of the prison service — was deemed praise-worthy.

Mr. Legere, who has almost three decades in Canadian prisons, on both male and female sides, is testifying at the Ontario coroner’s inquest into Ashley’s Oct. 19, 2007, asphyxiation death at the Grand Valley Institution in Kitchener, Ont.

For all his experience, he said, he’s not met anyone like the kid from Moncton, N.B.

He came to Nova from the Springhill Institution, a medium-security men’s prison with 500 inmates, and was “quite astonished at how engaged the women were with staff” at Nova, which has just 80 inmates.

Any prison has two basic functions — control of inmates and assistance to them — but at Nova, there was far more reliance on assistance, on empowering the inmates. The prison was “a very therapeutic environment.”

But within a week of her arrival there on Oct. 31, 2006, Ashley was “smearing body fluids” on her cell camera (so she couldn’t be monitored), throwing feces and urine at staff through the food slot and effectively had destroyed two of the three segregation cells (she broke sprinkler heads, a window, her bed frame and removed paint from the walls to use to cover the hated camera).

It’s apparent they tried hard at Nova: Psychologists and the prison psychiatrist were immediately involved; various plans were developed to get Ashley out of segregation by “shaping” her behavior; Mr. Legere even got around her covering her camera by posting a CO by the rear window, which is outdoors.

Ultimately, they built a platform with a small stepladder to get to it, and posted the guard atop it — and, with the onset of winter, eventually surrounded it with a temporary shelter, with a heater, and limited the length of time the COs would have to spend there.

But though Ashley would take “two or three steps forward”, these were always followed by “several large ones backward” and the triggers for her self-harming and destructive behaviour remained opaque.

Mr. Legere made weekly rounds to the seg unit, and spoke to Ashley a couple of times on these visits.

Once, having learned of her fondness for animals, he told her about the program called “Pawsitive Direction,” which sees inmates trained to be dog handlers and then actually train dogs rescued from shelters as assistance animals for disabled children.

As Mr. Legere said, “I got used to seeing a group of dogs coming through our front gate, 12-15 of them” and saw the results too, how “women who had never been cared for, or who had never cared for themselves,” learned to care for animals and ultimately for themselves.

(One day, he also saw a goat and a yak come into Nova with the dogs; “I was told they were to socialize with the dogs, of course,” he said with a grin.)

Ashley seemed interested, he said, but only for about five minutes.

She was at Nova until Dec. 19 of 2006, but returned for less than a month in late July, that stay cut short after another segregation inmate took a CO hostage and held a homemade shiv to her throat.

The incident ended peacefully, but within hours of it, Ashley was on a tear of tying up. The perpetually short-staffed staff was now also traumatized, with 13 COs off in one sweep on worker’s compensation.

“This took the therapeutic environment of Nova and changed it,” Mr. Legere said sadly, “probably forever.”

They’d collectively kept Ashley Smith alive, and now they were utterly out of gas.

In the circumstances, it was probably every bit the victory that the inmate who led the ovation believed it to be.

Mr. Legere soon approved an involuntary transfer to Grand Valley, where Ashley died less than two months later.

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